If I understand your question correctly, then yes, that's why we did it. The vast majority of banned users' comments belong under community review.
I should add that moderators are still going to intervene sometimes—just hopefully not very often. For one thing, some decisions only we have the data to make. For another, some decisions are based on the values of the site and those are not open to change. But the long-term vision for HN is to make it as self-regulating as possible, and it's been obvious for a long time that the bulk of HN moderation should be done by the community. The only question is what the right mechanisms are to get us there, and vouching is a big experiment in that.
Very promising announcements, Sam and Dan, although I have a few questions:
1) How does spinning out YC as its own service affect a) the job posting system and b) the YC class qualifiers in submission titles? / What does "editorial independence" mean in the context of his announcement? YC submissions had a lot of points, true, but I had thought that was attributed to the high YC user base.
2) Will users be able to vouch for [flagged] submissions in addition to [dead] submissions?
3) Due to the vouch system, will the use of banning in general be readdressed, since there is now a way to address false positives/negatives? Shadowbanning was implemented at Reddit as a last resort (that the new CEO wants to remove), and it isn't respectful to the user to not know if they are banned.
Doesn't affect (1) at all. As Sam mentioned, this is formalizing the de facto structure that's been in place a long time, so that announcement doesn't come with any changes to how HN works.
(2) Absolutely. Users can vouch for anything that's dead, including [flagged] and [dupe]. I see the notational confusion there; will ask Sam to update the post.
(3) Probably, but I'm not sure I agree with the line you're drawing from vouching to banning. Today's release massively lowers the cost an account of being banned. Instead of having your comments always stay [dead], they're now up for review by your fellow HNers; the community can decide what's good and bad. I'm not sure 'banned' is even the right word for it now— 'under moderation' would be closer.
The reason I say 'probably' above and not simply 'yes' is that there are a ton of issues to consider about it.
> If we notice abusive vouches, we'll take away vouching rights
That might scare some people away from vouching. Could you clarify whether it'll be more like, "If you wrongly vouch for even one single thing, we'll silently and permanently remove your vouching ability forever with no possible recourse" or more like, "If you show a repeated pattern of bad vouching, we'll reach out to you and explain what you're doing wrong, and only if it continues, take away your vouching privileges as a last resort, perhaps only temporarily" (or somewhere in between those extremes)?
P.S. I couldn't be happier to hear about Dan's promotion. He has an expert touch for community management, and (I learned after an opportunity to join him for beers one night) some deep wisdom on the subject, too.
I read it as the latter - I don't think it's unreasonable to interpret it as "we may take action if you're using separate accounts to unkill your own posts/repeatedly vouching for obviously abusive comments".
Please don't worry about this. It really is just like flagging. We only take away flagging rights if someone repeatedly misuses them—never for one random thing.
I wouldn't have even included the bit about taking away vouching rights except I know that the question "What if people just vouch for all the bad comments" was going to come up otherwise.
(Also, I don't think I've been promoted? But thanks—that's particularly meaningful coming from a seasoned veteran of the early Reddit...)
Well if there is editorial independence, will we still see posts for when YC companies are looking to hire people, where you can't leave a comment, I am guessing for fear of creating noise that is not helpful to the hiring process?
And will YC companies still get what appears to be preferential placement ("appears to be") for stories? [1] Some "more equal" than others?
If this is true independence then those benefits would be extended and/or eliminated.
[1] Or do stories about YC companies simple get more upvotes because of the balance in the community here toward people working at YC companies?
You shouldn't see anything change, because we haven't been subject to editorial pressure in the first place. The job ads will still be a thing but in my mind they're off to the side. We're not going to open them to comments because HN comments are for discussing intellectually interesting stories, which job ads aren't—they're job ads.
If you want to make claims about preferential placement (and yes I realize you're just saying "appears", but still, people are quick to believe these things), I'd appreciate concrete links so we can look into them. We try hard to be even-handed and when there are marginal calls, err on the side of not playing favorites.
YC founders and current/former employees are a large and valued part of this community, stories about YC startups often are interesting (by HN's definition), and lots of HN users like to follow them in particular, so of course you'll still see plenty of YC-related stories on the front page. It would be weird not to. Of course those stories are subject to upvoting and flagging as much as the others are.
Are you saying you'll be more reluctant to take away flagging rights than to take away commenting rights? Or do you feel that everyone who's been shadowbanned has in fact repeatedly misused their commenting rights?
Well, I didn't want to just contradict you and say that you are proposing that we do something that we don't in fact have the capacity to do. I wanted to give you the opportunity to explain how we do in fact have the capacity to do it, despite the appearance that we don't.
In the original article here, they discuss how the reason for this feature is that some people get shadowbanned a little too aggressively. "Banned accounts sometimes post good comments, software filters sometimes have false positives, and users sometimes flag things unfairly."
It seems to me the whole point of the vouch features is to have an easier recourse for other commenters to respond to people being shadowbanned (or otherwise dead for mistaken reasons, like tripping a filter or unfairly flagged by other users), rather than actually having to find the mod email and send an out of band message.
The problem is more complicated than that. Many banned accounts' comments aren't all bad. Unbanning them wholesale isn't an option if they're still going to break the HN guidelines. But killing all their comments wholesale isn't great either, if sometimes they post valuable things. So what we want is a mechanism that works at comment granularity rather than account granularity: let the good comments, and only the good comments, through. That's what this is intended to be.
> We only take away flagging rights if someone repeatedly misuses them—never for one random thing.
My flag link disappeared one day without notice or explanation, and stayed disappeared for a year or so. I continue to fear using the flag link, even when I think something should be flagged. There's no chance I'm going to vouch for something other people have flagged: I'd never have enough certainty that I'm more right than they are in your eyes. I value my ability to participate in this community too much to help moderate it under threat of punishment for doing so poorly.
Re: the replies below, the worst that can happen is not losing the vouch button, it's being silently shadowbanned for something else, when that wouldn't have happened if you hadn't put yourself on the admin's vouch review list for extra scrutiny. I already fear that happening any time I participate in one of those "what are you working on / what are your side projects" threads and include a link to my site.
Is that flagging on stories or on comments? For example, the flag button on comments only appears when you're on the comment's page, for example, I can see it right now, but when I was reading your comment, no flag button.
To prevent abusive flagging by making it too easy to flag comments, the 'flag' link on comments only appears when you're on the /item?id=... page of the comment, or the /reply?id=... page.
> There's no chance I'm going to vouch for something other people have flagged: I'd never have enough certainty that I'm more right than they are, not enough to risk your retribution. I value my ability to participate in this community too much to help moderate it under threat of punishment for doing so poorly.
This is confusing to me. Unless there's something nobody told me (always possible!) the only "punishment" they'd institute would be removing your vouching privileges. Not making use of the vouch feature out of fear you won't be able to use that feature seems entirely paradoxical. It's similarly paradoxical to say "I value my ability to participate too much to actually participate" unless I've simply missed some part where they say "we'll take away your submitting/commenting ability."
Welcome to human psychology! Yes, people are far more affected by losing something than gaining it or even using it. If you give someone $50 and then take it away, they will generally be very angry even though it's not like they really lost anything. I read a study on it once, but I can't find it now.
I don't entirely understand the logic here, you're afraid your ability to use X will be taken away, so you choose not to use X altogether? Isn't that sort of self-defeating?
Is it more of a concern about not being able to flag something when you feel very strongly it should be, the avoidance of feeling reprimanded by a community you care about, or something I haven't thought of?
Edit: At the heart of it my question is essentially the same as masterzora's. Perhaps I phrased it poorly? I don't mean to be dismissive or rude, I'm just trying to understand the psychology behind this.
EDIT (after downvotes): Because the mod team is responsive to discussion, and they would probably have let you know how you'd tripped the filter, and would possibly have reset it for you.
Just to vouch (har!) for the responsiveness of the mod team – I've reached out to them a few times for one thing or another and they've always responded in a prompt and friendly manner that has reinforced my willingness to reach out to them.
I don't remember ever seeing a flag link.. so have never downvoted.
But I do upvote stuff I like and especially stuff I think is being censored by group think... so that could explain why my flag priviliges where never given or taken away before I could notice it..
The flag link for comments is a little hard to find if you don't already know where it is. If you don't flag things, there's no way your flag privileges could be taken away.
> My flag link disappeared one day without notice or explanation, and stayed disappeared for a year or so.
The system does screw up sometimes. For about six months I couldn't submit articles without running into a "You are submitting too fast--slow down!" message. I don't submit all that often, so it took me a while to realize that it wasn't just responding to multiple recent comment posts and that something was wrong, but when I finally did email support, they said that my account had been flagged by mistake and fixed it promptly.
And much as I like the opacity of the Bruno Schulz quote, it probably would be a good idea for him to also mention there that he is the moderator of the site, and thus the likely recipient of those questions emailed to hn@ycombinator.com.
I agree. I'm a weirdo who reads all of 'dangs moderator comments and I think he should have a [mod] tag in his comment datelines, too. It seems like people pretty regularly confuse him for just another busybody user.
People who make that mistake are just outing themselves as newbs. Not that there's anything wrong with newbs, but it is useful to be able to just ignore their opinions about how HN should be.
My take is that not having the moderator moniker on his profile makes for less confrontational communications in regard to problematic behaviors. Sarting with the lightest touch that might work is probably better in the large and over the long run.
Once the [mod] tag is invoked the communication is to some extent out of band and fully public. It's a potential gasoline pour.
I really like the mechanism where a moderator can choose to add the [mod] tag to posts that they want to, but by default they just appear as a normal user.
For example, in the past dang has posted some really interesting content, but that should not be distinguished with a [mod] tag. Similarly interesting but non-moderator comments should not be distinguished.
"it probably would be a good idea for him to mention there that he is the moderator of the site"
I have mentioned that also in the past as I am sure others have.
Likewise for sama, for pg, for that matter anyone else that is involved in HN or YC. (Some do of course but for the life of me I don't know why sama and pg do not). All not listing info like this does is simply enforce some secret society of HN. Which is funny given how many comments seem to rally against things like that. It's like "let's shun the newbies and put them at a disadvantage vs. established people who know the ropes and the players..". "Isn't it funny when a newbie doesn't know they are speaking to Sam Altman in their reply haha.
For what it's worth, one of the features of HN is how firmly it discourages the segregation of insiders from outsiders. That's why there aren't long running insider jokes and there is a relatively low tolerance for meanness.
I don't think the way it is handled is perfect or ideal, but community is a hard problem.
You're not going to vouch... becuase you're scared if you do, they'll take away your vouching rights... which you weren't using anyway out of fear.... so you're scared of something that wouldn't matter to you anyway?
We did make one change in this department. If you click on a comment's timestamp to go to its individual page, dead and downvoted comments should no longer be faded out. That's so people who want to consider vouching for a comment will be able to read it.
In case anyone is wondering, 'flag' and 'vouch' links don't appear beside comments in threads. You have to go to the comment's individual page (linked from its timestamp) to see them.
Good change, by the way. Don't know how many times I've (probably fruitlessly) commented next to a dead comment to point out that they're unknowingly accidentally shadowbanned.
For iOS HN apps, my current preference is Akepa owing to its features and attention to detail--including comment collapsing, bookmarks, history, Readability integration, and replies (using it now for this comment). The performance is quite snappy as well since it uses native components instead of a being a wrapper.
I'd prefer a bit more separation between up / downvote buttons.
I'd prefer the text to be a bit larger, although I accept that some people would hate larger text. Is this the kind of thing that HN could have a setting for? optional style sheets? (Because users can't set their own styles on mobile).
> Because users can't set their own styles on mobile
Stylish works great with Firefox on my phone. Doesn't help you if you're using another browser or stuck with a phone which doesn't let you choose your own browser (do those exist?), of course.
I'm glad that improvements are being made to community moderation, however as someone that doesn't comment much or read comments that often, improving mobile would be something I would put higher on the priority list.
What is there to complain about? It's a website that works fine on mobile and loads fast. It doesn't prevent me from zooming the way some mobile pages to, and it generally just works like it does from the desktop. I wish more sites were like this.
You can zoom in, but then you have to scroll left-right to read anything. At least it is that way with the default Chrome browser on Android. For me, I just use Opera when browsing HN which lets you set auto-reflow when zoomed in (although Opera isn't useful on sites that are designed for mobile, as it doesn't let you override those sites' zoom block).
Yes please. But sadly I have given up hope. This has not been a priority and the one attempt that was made to make things better brought out a pitchfork-armed mob to change it back because the top nav took up two lines gasp. I believe this is because YC is finding that stealth startup that is developing artificial eye balls, so they are prepping their first customers here. Either that, or everyone at YC got the iPad Pro back in 2008 and they are laughing at us with our puny 6 inch screens.
How are you accessing it on mobile? Is this a phone or a tablet? What app are you going through?
I am just curious because I use a 7" tablet frequently and have no problem. It used to crash my browser or tablet or something, some years ago. I changed browsers and it stopped happening. PG couldn't find anything on his end.
This is exciting! I look forward to seeing the vouch feature in action. I notice a certain classes of stories regularly being flagged off the homepage, mainly those that deal with racism or sexism in the tech community. Being able to rescue quality stories on those topics should provide some interesting fodder for discussion.
I'd like to be optimistic. Yet the issue I experience with stories on those topics is that the discussions tend to attract trolling behavior and the exact sort of expressions of outrage that behavior seeks to evoke. To me, the quality issue isn't the story. It's the counterproductive comments.
Oftentimes racism or sexism topics aren't flagged off the homepage, but subject to decreasing rank based on comment activity. Lots of comments -> likely flame wars, or so the argument goes.
Vouching won't change how those topics are treated. And to be honest, I don't know that I mind. HN has a problem discussing sexism in a nontoxic way. I accept the argument that sexism in particular should be a banned HN topic (the way politics is) for the sake of healthy discourse.
Now I think that the conversation on sexism in the tech industry is important, and I think 'healthy' discourse is an illusion used to mask certain political motives, and I have a generally low opinion of HN's moderation policies, implementation, and clarity.
That doesn't mean that banning sexism as a topic would be inconsistent. It would be too consistent: instead it's easier to just penalize quickly commented posts, which happens to frequently apply to topics on sexism.
I just wanted to point out that "interesting fodder for discussion" is not exactly a goal of the moderation team, at least not if it includes "racism or sexism in the tech community."
>I don't plan to be very involved--other than as an enthusiastic user (who would, however, prefer that it be easier to read on a phone)
I always assumed not having a mobile style sheet was intentional to slow down eternal September, but if sama is asking for it then that can't be the case, right?
But most of the complaints about that are coming from existing Hacker News users, for whom the experience on mobile is terrible.
If Hacker News was as adamant about stopping the Eternal September effect as some people believe, they would demand references and a CV before letting anyone join, or else be invite-only like lobste.rs. Not having a mobile stylesheet doesn't really seem like it would help in that regard.
Cynicism and incivility are far more corrosive to this community than the Eternal September effect could be, anyway.
That would not be HN and would be throwing the baby out with the bathwater. I would imagine most users have used a throwaway acct to make some comment without being brutalized, and some of the best comments come from new users.
My argument is that not having a mobile stylesheet isn't keeping low quality users from showing up, it's mostly annoying the ones who are already here. As a way of holding back the Eternal September effect, bad mobile UX seems like a specious idea at best - which is why I doubt that has anything to do with the state of the mobile experience here.
"Looking at who complains" isn't evidence of that, though. One could argue that the low quality users are so turned off by the mobile experience that they can't even complain about it.
That said, I wouldn't mind a better mobile site. If we want to be elitist about it, just make it available for users with > 10 karma. ;)
In light of this, what about the submissions that don't allow comments?
I've never really understood what those are in the first place, and am curious what they'll be following this statement of editorial independence. Are those advertisements dang does and will continue to pick and choose? Not that I really care, but they've always seemed a bit out of place.
In that case, you just might want Sam to tone down that "full editorial independence" statement. It's fine that you give special treatment to YC, but please don't claim a virtue you don't have.
I'm not sure I agree with you there. Doesn't the term "editorial independence" come from newspapers? Those always had ads.
Indeed the nice thing about the current arrangement is that the YC startup job ads are completely up-front, always work the same way, and have a fixed effect on the front page. So it doesn't affect editorial judgment at all. (Except that we try to take linkbait out of the titles and I'm surprised that no YC startup has asked us about that yet.)
I'm not talking about ads in general. I'm saying that when the only "ads" run are for the editorial outlet's parent company's investment interests, well, isn't that a bit... I dunno... incongruous with the nature of advertisement in a paper?
I understand editorial independence to mean that we make decisions based on what's best for HN and its community, not YC's immediate business interests.
I qualified that with "immediate" because an independent HN focused on intellectual curiosity is what's best for YC's business. That's the global optimum. It would be foolish to trade it away for any local one (e.g. handling a particular YC-related story differently). What makes HN valuable to YC is optimizing its value to the community. Everyone at YC knows that.
The main benefit of today's announcement is if it helps us make that clearer to others. Understandably, people sometimes take it for granted that since HN is owned by an investment business, it must directly serve that business. Those concerns won't go away, but it will be nice to be able to point to the org structure and say that's why it's set up that way.
Not that I am a proponent of ads or sponsored content, but a crazy experiment just occurred to me: a steeply discounted sponsored ad filter/section with the same upvote/downvote rules as the rest of the site (but still no comments). The advertiser faces the risk of wasting money by inappropriately targeting the community's interests. Potentially higher engagement because if you give users the right to express an up/down opinion, they're going to do it whether it is advertising or not, so at least they're viewing the ads. The scoring is all relative, so even if 80% of the people down vote out of principle, the better and more interesting ads will still percolate to the top.
I am clearly in the minority here, but I really don't mind (and somewhat enjoy) the mobile experience because I can glance at ~25 stories without scrolling instead of the 3-5 stories that the HN redesigns typically show without scrolling.
Visually it is stunning, however functionally, I use HN to glance at the top things happening in the tech/startup community and the premii link only shows me 6 stories before I have to scroll.
Yes, scrolling isn't that big of a deal, but neither is stunning design for the sake of stunning design. (Just my own personal opinion and I genuinely enjoy that you like that premii link; it just isn't for me)
There is also an app for Android that is somewhat similar to that one, and being an app it starts faster than the browser opening the website.
In fact I enjoy reading HN from that app more than reading it from a desktop.
I agree that information density can be lacking with some of the redesigns... but I want to point out that if you're able to read HN on a mobile screen it is because you are blessed with youth and/or good vision.
A lot of us can't make out the text when it is so small, so a ton of pinch-zooming is necessary, which is a rough user experience.
(That being said, at least pinch-zooming is an option... nothing bothers me more than when a site actively disabled zooming on mobile with the god-forsaken "user-scalable=no" meta viewport attribute!)
Could not agree more (re: youth/good vision) which is why I personally don't mind if there was a mobile optimized user experience.
My only hope in saying my comment is that I would have the ability to set the way HN is now as my default mobile viewing version and allow others to view the mobile optimized version.
For me the ideal solution would be if you could pinch zoom and have the text wrap to the viewport. Best of both worlds. A handful of sites seem to support this (at least on the browser I use), but it's unfortunately not very common.
I can't help but like the spirit of the vouch system, and I'm sure quite a bit of thought went into it. But at the same time I'm wondering if the site really needs two different versions of up-vote/down-vote with different different semantics.
Still, I get it, it's a kind of super-vote, reserved for people with a little karma (i.e. some "skin in the game"). Out of curiosity, how'd you guys arrive at 30 for cutoff?
30 is the flag threshold and has been for years. I don't know how pg picked it. It works well, though, and we like that it isn't a high bar.
You'd be surprised at how different votes and flags are in effect. The upvoting system is a lot more broken than the flagging system is. People tend to upvote as a reflexive "me like" instead of a reflective "this is interesting". (That's not a criticism—it's simply the chemical reaction of the voting mechanism and human nature.) Flagging is much more reflective in practice. You can think of vouches as an experiment in seeing whether up-flagging can contribute as much value to HN as down-flagging has.
It's a bit startling to read an acknowledgement that up/down voting conflates disagreement with lack of value, and that this effect is undesirable. Debate over this point continues to bubble up every once in a while on HN, with some commenters pointing to pg's casual statement from some time ago that he was okay with a downvote meaning "I disagree."
Is it important to the design of HN that the community engage with (i.e., not shun into oblivion) worthy points of view with which it disagrees?
If that is valuable to the design of HN, may we simply accept that voting registers agreement and let another mechanism such as the flagging system be the place to register a comment's value? Perhaps we can display the measure of agreement in a more subtle way than is presently the case and refrain from pushing those comments completely out of the conversation.
Oh dear. Nothing that I said was meant to express any policy about downvoting and certainly not any change in policy about downvoting. It's just a separate topic.
I didn't interpret it that way, and I apologize if it seemed that I did.
I was actually hoping for some read on the two questions I gave because I believe these are important issues, and your comment prompted an opportunity to raise them.
Please, no need to apologize. People have really strong opinions about this, as I'm sure you know, and I'm not sure yet how to comment on it in a helpful way.
Suppose my click on the down arrow expresses the thought "you're wrong, fuck you". HN is better off when that's the end of it...whatever it was and regardless of if it was in the comment or in me or in both.
The main problem is that upvotes and downvotes are devalued because they are essentially unlimited. What if karma behaved more as a currency and the costs increased as you used it repeatedly in the same comment thread. First one is free, then it costs you 1, then 5, etc.
Variations of this have been suggested many times. I'd be curious to try it someday if we could figure out a way to do it that didn't put anything important at risk.
It would make me less likely to upvote more than one comment per thread. That seems like a downside - a good thread can have several comments worthy of upvotes.
A slightly tangential question that I have tried looking for an answer in the FAQs but couldn't: what is the required karma to earn the downvote privilege? Couldn't find this documented anywhere. I apologize if I didn't look hard enough.
> People tend to upvote as a reflexive "me like" instead of a reflective "this is interesting".
I do this for sure. I do a bit of both, using both semantics for different cases.
Thanks for the explanation. I wonder if somebody here would like to take a stab at analyzing user data to see if 30 really is the best karma for "unlocking" these powers.
I think more important than resurrecting posts from people who have squandered their privileges are we need to allow for better and more convenient browsing of comments, so that we can let the best ones shine.
1) native folding of comments, like reddit. I don't understand why this doesn't exist yet, and is the single more important thing to going through the comment list effectively.
2) better algos for upvoting and downvoting comments and threads entirely. This is something that reddit is absolutely great at, the top comments on reddit are generally the best or funniest, depending on the context. The top comments here are generally the first ones posted, or the ones from people already with high karma, and thus either the fast or the already-karma-advantaged get more karma.
I doubt there is any principled reason for the lack. Rather, I think it's just that the people in a position to make the improvement don't place the importance on it that you do. Personally, it's not a feature I've ever wanted. I'm using the https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hckr-news/mnlaodle... extension, which offers this, and never once have I intentionally folded a comment.
Accidentally, I've folded comments many times. My main improvement to the extension (if I were to write my own) would be to _remove_ the folding feature and just have new comment highlighting (which I find much more important than folding). Separately, if this is an important feature, why not use an extension that offers it? Is there a reason it needs to be built in?
It's useful when a parent comment spawns hundreds of replies and you're not interested in the direction the parent comment has taken the discussion, but want to discuss other parts of the article.
It doesn't happen that often, but when it does it's annoying scrolling trying to find the next top level comment.
In theory, I wouldn't disagree. But in practice, I've been using an extension that offers this capability for years now, and have never intentionally collapsed a comment thread. The utility depends on your usage pattern, and my point was only that it's not a universal desire. This doesn't mean it shouldn't be added, but for me, it simply adds clutter to a clean interface, with small buttons that I occasionally accidentally click and unclick. Do I take it that you are using an extension that allows this, and find it useful?
I didn't use it much. I haven't installed it on my new machines. I miss it occasionally.
We hackers will put up with really shitty UIs though, as virtually every one of our tools attests. It's like code indentation, we've all had to search for the next root node in an editor without highlighting or collapsing.
> Separately, if this is an important feature, why not use an extension that offers it? Is there a reason it needs to be built in?
Because I only think about it on average once every few days when I encounter an uninteresting large comment tree in an otherwise interesting thread, which I handle by scrolling for a few seconds.
It's very much a "nice to have" rather than a dealbreaker, but for those of us accustomed to the feature as implemented on, e.g., reddit or slashdot, it's a puzzling omission.
Not having folding comments encourages me to read a good random sample of comments (as opposed to only the root comments) which has usually resulted in some fantastic discussion. On Reddit I read root comments and then instinctively collapse the remainder.
That's not to say folding comments wouldn't be nice, I'm just providing some counterarguments for them.
Exactly. While we're trying to improve HN, how about a proper mobile layout? You know, one with upvote buttons larger than 3 pixels so, you know, I can actually click them? We're hackers, not luddities without smartphones.
Isn't an upvote something you feel should be on the front page? What's the different between the way upvotes count and the way vouches will count? Does one weigh heavier? Was it not in the cards to make upvotes "vouch" for a post?
I'm not sure I understand all those questions, but years of experience have shown that votes and flags are radically different things, and vouches are very much on the flag side of that distinction.
Hacker news is analogous to a single subreddit. Many subreddits do have this level of interaction with the "mods" of the subreddit. While I am no longer a reddit user, I recognize that while supporting the long tail by having subreddits and promoting diversity, they have a massively difficult time communicating and pleasing their users.
Happy to take the compliment, but Reddit is two orders of magnitude bigger than we are. That's several layers of 'qualitatively different' away, so the comparison isn't fair. We're in awe of what they have to deal with. I can't imagine it.
For now, you still have to view the page logged-out. We're probably going to change this eventually. It's clear that better feedback mechanisms to let people know when they've violated the site guidelines—and when they haven't—could add a lot of value to HN.
We're working on it and it's coming. No one will be happier than I am when it's out, though I'm worried that it will be impossible to please everyone, because the specific requests we get are disparate and even contradictory. We'll have a considerable period of testing and feedback though.
If Digg and Slashdot are any guide, it might be wise to just do a slight enhancement to improve mobile proportions and sizing, rather than any re-design.
Yes. We're going to look at all the vouched comments and the feature succeeds or fails to the degree that those follow or break the HN guidelines by our usual moderation standards. Not sure if that's a "metric" but that's the idea. Beyond that, the only thing that would make us retract the feature is some bad consequence we didn't foresee.
During testing we did notice an unforeseen consequence, but it was a good one. Reviewing vouched comments naturally leads to looking at the history of a banned account, and in a few cases we just unbanned it. Some had been banned for an obvious reason in the past, but recent comments were fine. Others had been banned by mistake, such as by a rogue spam filter. So although this feature applies on a per-comment level, it can have per-account side-effects.
This also raises the question of whether we can take this feature all the way to letting the community manage which accounts are banned (presumably with occasional moderator overrides). That's on our list, though it's too soon to tell if it will work.
Dan, speaking of experiments, can I pitch an idea?
Mix a random story from the New page into the front page on each page load.
This should get more eyeballs on new submissions, with more even exposure across HN populus and ultimately increase the overall appeal of the front page material. Should make the FP a bit more dynamic too.
Let me try to distill this even further - let people have better control of the way list pages and threads are sorted. Filters like that could easily be added through the user control panel and applied as query strings without affecting the appearance of the rest of the site. Being able to sort a thread by most recent comments rather than just karma would be great.
We alpha-tested that and it didn't work. The median item on /newest is far too low-quality (by HN's definition) for randomness to do much good there. In practice, it just mixes junk onto the front page—the worst thing that can happen to the front page.
(I've posted about this a few times; let me see if I can find the links.)
Edit: I found some of them, in addition to the ones scott_s mentioned downthread.
Those links are about an experiment we tried that did work, and which we've expanded. If you get an invitation asking you to repost a story, that's the latest incarnation of this. Where we're stuck is on figuring out a way to let the community manage it that wouldn't just reduce to how upvoting works now. We're working on it though.
The latter also mentions the old thing that did not work, where you just pulled a random post for /newest, and put it at the bottom of the front page. I see the current, successful, technique as an iteration of the failed one.
What about adding a couple of random "new" articles at the end of the front page, clearly marking them as "new"?
This would help people that simply don't take the time to click the "new" button often enough - people like me - to contribute to the initial selection much more often.
But junk would be completely expected in this case, wouldn't it?
The simplest option would seem to tag these mixins somehow to make them obvious and, perhaps, allow opting out of this altogether in the account settings.
I'd urge you to try it again, but on a large scale. I know I personally would tolerate one questionable entry on the FP if it frees me from the need to do the /new duty.
____
(Edit) I should've not said "mix a random story", but rather "show a random story", somewhere on the FP, at a fixed place and clearly marked as such. This is it.
A related thing: what about considering the number of people who clicked on the article or comments links in addition (or even instead of) to the number of upvotes?
For article links, it can be tracked with navigator.sendBeacon for recent browsers with JavaScript enabled, and a server-side redirect otherwise.
There is some risk of promoting click-bait this way though, so might need to be careful and provide an "undo upvote" or downvote button, and perhaps find some click-bait-related signals to hedge against (maybe time until next action on HN, titles with lots of generic words, similarity to Buzzfeed headlines, etc.).
I think this is a great idea for the community. I applaud this decision because there are quite a few accelerators, but the special part about YC is HN. Being open enough to give it it's own editorial steering wheel is a great indication of goodwill to the community :)
Now that HN is it's own thing, maybe we'll see access(api?) for vote attribution?
Is that even remotely possible? Or, are the implicit privacy issues too much of a burden?
I was thinking it would put rest to the voting rings theory if anyone had access to everyone else's vote history. But, the cost probably isn't worth the benefit.
"Now that HN is it's own thing, maybe we'll see access(api?) for vote attribution?"
I'm curious why you'd want this? Typically when voting people don't expect that they're going to be 'named and shamed', or even categorized on any level other than anonymously for stats.
Cool update, I am happy to see Sam's vision for HN is the for it to be independent and a robust institution for the tech community. I think the vouch feature might be cool, but we'll see how it plays out since honestly I don't experience many incorrectly killed comments.
There used to be the occasional outburst of suspicion of mean moderators with double agendas hellbanning great commenters. Dang's been very active presence here recently to explain decisions that might've seemed fishy, and that has already done a lot to remove that kind of thinking.
Nevertheless, the conspiracy theories and rebellious "<name in other thread>, looks like you've been hellbanned by the evil mods!" comments are still around, and I suspect that the 'vouch' feature will help kill the last of it. I really hope that it'll work as intended!
(assuming it's all unfounded of course, which I believe it is)
Although "<name in other thread>, looks like you've been hellbanned by the evil mods!" comments are bad, I'm not sure I've seen them. I have seen comments like "<name in other thread, you appear to have been hellbanned", but I think they were sometimes warranted. The moderators do sometimes make mistakes, and IIUC the normal way to resolve them is: user realizes they are hellbanned, mails the mods asking about it, and the mods, if they feel the user should not be hellbanned, unbans them. Alerting commenters that one thinks may have been banned by mistake of their ban can either speeds this process along or wastes comment space and moderator attention, depending on whether one is correct.
I agree that hopefully vouching will kill the "<name>, you appear to have been hellbanned" comments, though.
I don't think it's a "conspiracy," but HN has many means of opaque moderation (shadowbans, slowbans, arbitrary score penalties to control the front page), and they continue to be applied with no accountability. We play here at the mercy of capricious Gods.
I believe along side of the changes mentioned for Vouching (which I think is an incredible idea), I'd like to see changes to the way that submission titles are changed. I'm actually very much for changing titles that are clickbait-y or misleading, but I feel like sometimes the original intention of the article is lost when the titles are changed. I think it would help a tremendous amount if a changed headline is noted as changed (for example, with an asterisk like the on on this post) so that users know that they aren't the original submission. I think it would be even more helpful if hovering over that asterisk to show, or including a link to show, the original title would help. That way it's hidden from being easily influenceable on voting but still allows the initial context of the submission to be present
Otherwise, I think both of these announcements are great news and would like to offer congratulations to Y Combinator, Dan and the whole community for keeping this such a useful site and community through all these years, even despite growth and changes to members.
Do we really need these "vouch" link? It seems like complicated for no reasons. People with showdead could just be able to upvote [dead] comments just like other comments (is it not the case already?) and a [dead] comment with enough upvote should be unkilled. And then a banned account with enough unkilled comments should be unbanned. Seems like a simple solution with no changes in the UX.
This reads like a transcript from our early design conversations! What swayed us in the end is that the upvoting and flagging mechanisms are qualitatively different. (In fact it's crazy how different they are.) Whatever's going on there is an important psychological distinction, and collapsing upvoting and flagging for technical reasons—an obvious simplicity win—loses out to that. It's also worth noting that flags are treated differently by the software than downvotes are (or would be if we had them, in the case of stories).
Once we recognized the distinction between voting and flagging it seemed more natural to have this new feature be on the flagging side, hence vouches. The jury's still out on whether it's a good idea or not, though; if it turns out bad, we might consider reverting to the voting idea.
nah, I don't think of flag/vouch as the same as upvote/downvote.
Regardless of the constant arguments around it, I use upvote/downvote on opinions I agree/disagree with. I'd use flag/vouch for things that I don't/do think should be on HN at all.
e.g., on a Pokemon forum I can strongly disagree with someone who says squirtel is the better than pikachu because water-type has more advantages that electric-type. I might downvote it, maybe. But if someone posts "Pokemon are stupid, you're all wasting your lives you big losers." ...I'd flag that. Conversely, if I posted how electric-type pokemon are the best and I notice a dead-reply to me explaining very clearly a position supporting water-type pokemon as best, I'd vouch for it. While I might not agree with the argument, I can at least vouch that it shouldn't be dead.
299 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 362 ms ] threadHow will this affect shadowbanned users, though? Can a shadowbanned user's comment ever be vouched from the grave?
I should add that moderators are still going to intervene sometimes—just hopefully not very often. For one thing, some decisions only we have the data to make. For another, some decisions are based on the values of the site and those are not open to change. But the long-term vision for HN is to make it as self-regulating as possible, and it's been obvious for a long time that the bulk of HN moderation should be done by the community. The only question is what the right mechanisms are to get us there, and vouching is a big experiment in that.
1) How does spinning out YC as its own service affect a) the job posting system and b) the YC class qualifiers in submission titles? / What does "editorial independence" mean in the context of his announcement? YC submissions had a lot of points, true, but I had thought that was attributed to the high YC user base.
2) Will users be able to vouch for [flagged] submissions in addition to [dead] submissions?
3) Due to the vouch system, will the use of banning in general be readdressed, since there is now a way to address false positives/negatives? Shadowbanning was implemented at Reddit as a last resort (that the new CEO wants to remove), and it isn't respectful to the user to not know if they are banned.
EDIT: Reordered to match dang's responses.
(2) Absolutely. Users can vouch for anything that's dead, including [flagged] and [dupe]. I see the notational confusion there; will ask Sam to update the post.
(3) Probably, but I'm not sure I agree with the line you're drawing from vouching to banning. Today's release massively lowers the cost an account of being banned. Instead of having your comments always stay [dead], they're now up for review by your fellow HNers; the community can decide what's good and bad. I'm not sure 'banned' is even the right word for it now— 'under moderation' would be closer.
The reason I say 'probably' above and not simply 'yes' is that there are a ton of issues to consider about it.
If you were to rename the "duped" label, may I suggest "nuked"?
That might scare some people away from vouching. Could you clarify whether it'll be more like, "If you wrongly vouch for even one single thing, we'll silently and permanently remove your vouching ability forever with no possible recourse" or more like, "If you show a repeated pattern of bad vouching, we'll reach out to you and explain what you're doing wrong, and only if it continues, take away your vouching privileges as a last resort, perhaps only temporarily" (or somewhere in between those extremes)?
P.S. I couldn't be happier to hear about Dan's promotion. He has an expert touch for community management, and (I learned after an opportunity to join him for beers one night) some deep wisdom on the subject, too.
I wouldn't have even included the bit about taking away vouching rights except I know that the question "What if people just vouch for all the bad comments" was going to come up otherwise.
(Also, I don't think I've been promoted? But thanks—that's particularly meaningful coming from a seasoned veteran of the early Reddit...)
Editorial independence is a big vote of confidence; they don't toss that set of keys to just any old schmuck.
But I agree, this is a huge vote of confidence
And will YC companies still get what appears to be preferential placement ("appears to be") for stories? [1] Some "more equal" than others?
If this is true independence then those benefits would be extended and/or eliminated.
[1] Or do stories about YC companies simple get more upvotes because of the balance in the community here toward people working at YC companies?
If you want to make claims about preferential placement (and yes I realize you're just saying "appears", but still, people are quick to believe these things), I'd appreciate concrete links so we can look into them. We try hard to be even-handed and when there are marginal calls, err on the side of not playing favorites.
YC founders and current/former employees are a large and valued part of this community, stories about YC startups often are interesting (by HN's definition), and lots of HN users like to follow them in particular, so of course you'll still see plenty of YC-related stories on the front page. It would be weird not to. Of course those stories are subject to upvoting and flagging as much as the others are.
Best wishes.
That's a little uncharitable, considering this feature is acknowledging that the moderators can make mistakes.
It seems to me the whole point of the vouch features is to have an easier recourse for other commenters to respond to people being shadowbanned (or otherwise dead for mistaken reasons, like tripping a filter or unfairly flagged by other users), rather than actually having to find the mod email and send an out of band message.
My flag link disappeared one day without notice or explanation, and stayed disappeared for a year or so. I continue to fear using the flag link, even when I think something should be flagged. There's no chance I'm going to vouch for something other people have flagged: I'd never have enough certainty that I'm more right than they are in your eyes. I value my ability to participate in this community too much to help moderate it under threat of punishment for doing so poorly.
Re: the replies below, the worst that can happen is not losing the vouch button, it's being silently shadowbanned for something else, when that wouldn't have happened if you hadn't put yourself on the admin's vouch review list for extra scrutiny. I already fear that happening any time I participate in one of those "what are you working on / what are your side projects" threads and include a link to my site.
This is confusing to me. Unless there's something nobody told me (always possible!) the only "punishment" they'd institute would be removing your vouching privileges. Not making use of the vouch feature out of fear you won't be able to use that feature seems entirely paradoxical. It's similarly paradoxical to say "I value my ability to participate too much to actually participate" unless I've simply missed some part where they say "we'll take away your submitting/commenting ability."
You mean you had it once, but now you lost it?
Is it more of a concern about not being able to flag something when you feel very strongly it should be, the avoidance of feeling reprimanded by a community you care about, or something I haven't thought of?
Edit: At the heart of it my question is essentially the same as masterzora's. Perhaps I phrased it poorly? I don't mean to be dismissive or rude, I'm just trying to understand the psychology behind this.
EDIT (after downvotes): Because the mod team is responsive to discussion, and they would probably have let you know how you'd tripped the filter, and would possibly have reset it for you.
But I do upvote stuff I like and especially stuff I think is being censored by group think... so that could explain why my flag priviliges where never given or taken away before I could notice it..
The system does screw up sometimes. For about six months I couldn't submit articles without running into a "You are submitting too fast--slow down!" message. I don't submit all that often, so it took me a while to realize that it wasn't just responding to multiple recent comment posts and that something was wrong, but when I finally did email support, they said that my account had been flagged by mistake and fixed it promptly.
This "feature" needs to crawl into a hole and die anyway.
Sarcasm? Irony? Or am I really thinking like that?
Depends on my mood and the experiences I had that day with people. ;-)
https://blog.ycombinator.com/meet-the-people-taking-over-hac...
That said, Dan Gackle (pronounced Gackley, like the town in North Dakota: http://www.gacklenorthdakota.com/) should consider adding his full name to his HN profile: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=dang
And much as I like the opacity of the Bruno Schulz quote, it probably would be a good idea for him to also mention there that he is the moderator of the site, and thus the likely recipient of those questions emailed to hn@ycombinator.com.
I think a "mod" tag makes sense.
Once the [mod] tag is invoked the communication is to some extent out of band and fully public. It's a potential gasoline pour.
For example, in the past dang has posted some really interesting content, but that should not be distinguished with a [mod] tag. Similarly interesting but non-moderator comments should not be distinguished.
I have mentioned that also in the past as I am sure others have.
Likewise for sama, for pg, for that matter anyone else that is involved in HN or YC. (Some do of course but for the life of me I don't know why sama and pg do not). All not listing info like this does is simply enforce some secret society of HN. Which is funny given how many comments seem to rally against things like that. It's like "let's shun the newbies and put them at a disadvantage vs. established people who know the ropes and the players..". "Isn't it funny when a newbie doesn't know they are speaking to Sam Altman in their reply haha.
I don't think the way it is handled is perfect or ideal, but community is a hard problem.
Do you think we could maybe work towards removing hellbanning/shadowbanning of site features for non-spam users at some point?
Seconded. I'd also like to see something implemented to control the contrast on downvoted/dead entries.
Either collapse them ala reddit or give me the option to disable the low contrast view.
In case anyone is wondering, 'flag' and 'vouch' links don't appear beside comments in threads. You have to go to the comment's individual page (linked from its timestamp) to see them.
Good change, by the way. Don't know how many times I've (probably fruitlessly) commented next to a dead comment to point out that they're unknowingly accidentally shadowbanned.
Although HN should have a responsive UI the way Lobster does it: https://lobste.rs/
Please add the ability to undo/change an upvote or downvote. It's very easy to accidentally vote on something when scrolling on a mobile device.
I'd prefer a bit more separation between up / downvote buttons.
I'd prefer the text to be a bit larger, although I accept that some people would hate larger text. Is this the kind of thing that HN could have a setting for? optional style sheets? (Because users can't set their own styles on mobile).
Stylish works great with Firefox on my phone. Doesn't help you if you're using another browser or stuck with a phone which doesn't let you choose your own browser (do those exist?), of course.
I am just curious because I use a 7" tablet frequently and have no problem. It used to crash my browser or tablet or something, some years ago. I changed browsers and it stopped happening. PG couldn't find anything on his end.
It even supports thread collapsing.
Vouching won't change how those topics are treated. And to be honest, I don't know that I mind. HN has a problem discussing sexism in a nontoxic way. I accept the argument that sexism in particular should be a banned HN topic (the way politics is) for the sake of healthy discourse.
Now I think that the conversation on sexism in the tech industry is important, and I think 'healthy' discourse is an illusion used to mask certain political motives, and I have a generally low opinion of HN's moderation policies, implementation, and clarity.
That doesn't mean that banning sexism as a topic would be inconsistent. It would be too consistent: instead it's easier to just penalize quickly commented posts, which happens to frequently apply to topics on sexism.
I just wanted to point out that "interesting fodder for discussion" is not exactly a goal of the moderation team, at least not if it includes "racism or sexism in the tech community."
I always assumed not having a mobile style sheet was intentional to slow down eternal September, but if sama is asking for it then that can't be the case, right?
If Hacker News was as adamant about stopping the Eternal September effect as some people believe, they would demand references and a CV before letting anyone join, or else be invite-only like lobste.rs. Not having a mobile stylesheet doesn't really seem like it would help in that regard.
Cynicism and incivility are far more corrosive to this community than the Eternal September effect could be, anyway.
That would not be HN and would be throwing the baby out with the bathwater. I would imagine most users have used a throwaway acct to make some comment without being brutalized, and some of the best comments come from new users.
I'm not sure what your argument is here. Who else would complain? The people who have been driven away?
That said, I wouldn't mind a better mobile site. If we want to be elitist about it, just make it available for users with > 10 karma. ;)
I like it.
I've never really understood what those are in the first place, and am curious what they'll be following this statement of editorial independence. Are those advertisements dang does and will continue to pick and choose? Not that I really care, but they've always seemed a bit out of place.
Other than that, I think all live posts are open to comments.
Indeed the nice thing about the current arrangement is that the YC startup job ads are completely up-front, always work the same way, and have a fixed effect on the front page. So it doesn't affect editorial judgment at all. (Except that we try to take linkbait out of the titles and I'm surprised that no YC startup has asked us about that yet.)
I qualified that with "immediate" because an independent HN focused on intellectual curiosity is what's best for YC's business. That's the global optimum. It would be foolish to trade it away for any local one (e.g. handling a particular YC-related story differently). What makes HN valuable to YC is optimizing its value to the community. Everyone at YC knows that.
The main benefit of today's announcement is if it helps us make that clearer to others. Understandably, people sometimes take it for granted that since HN is owned by an investment business, it must directly serve that business. Those concerns won't go away, but it will be nice to be able to point to the org structure and say that's why it's set up that way.
Yes, scrolling isn't that big of a deal, but neither is stunning design for the sake of stunning design. (Just my own personal opinion and I genuinely enjoy that you like that premii link; it just isn't for me)
A lot of us can't make out the text when it is so small, so a ton of pinch-zooming is necessary, which is a rough user experience.
(That being said, at least pinch-zooming is an option... nothing bothers me more than when a site actively disabled zooming on mobile with the god-forsaken "user-scalable=no" meta viewport attribute!)
My only hope in saying my comment is that I would have the ability to set the way HN is now as my default mobile viewing version and allow others to view the mobile optimized version.
Still, I get it, it's a kind of super-vote, reserved for people with a little karma (i.e. some "skin in the game"). Out of curiosity, how'd you guys arrive at 30 for cutoff?
You'd be surprised at how different votes and flags are in effect. The upvoting system is a lot more broken than the flagging system is. People tend to upvote as a reflexive "me like" instead of a reflective "this is interesting". (That's not a criticism—it's simply the chemical reaction of the voting mechanism and human nature.) Flagging is much more reflective in practice. You can think of vouches as an experiment in seeing whether up-flagging can contribute as much value to HN as down-flagging has.
Is it important to the design of HN that the community engage with (i.e., not shun into oblivion) worthy points of view with which it disagrees?
If that is valuable to the design of HN, may we simply accept that voting registers agreement and let another mechanism such as the flagging system be the place to register a comment's value? Perhaps we can display the measure of agreement in a more subtle way than is presently the case and refrain from pushing those comments completely out of the conversation.
I was actually hoping for some read on the two questions I gave because I believe these are important issues, and your comment prompted an opportunity to raise them.
Suppose my click on the down arrow expresses the thought "you're wrong, fuck you". HN is better off when that's the end of it...whatever it was and regardless of if it was in the comment or in me or in both.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7606199
I do this for sure. I do a bit of both, using both semantics for different cases.
Thanks for the explanation. I wonder if somebody here would like to take a stab at analyzing user data to see if 30 really is the best karma for "unlocking" these powers.
1) native folding of comments, like reddit. I don't understand why this doesn't exist yet, and is the single more important thing to going through the comment list effectively.
2) better algos for upvoting and downvoting comments and threads entirely. This is something that reddit is absolutely great at, the top comments on reddit are generally the best or funniest, depending on the context. The top comments here are generally the first ones posted, or the ones from people already with high karma, and thus either the fast or the already-karma-advantaged get more karma.
This one seems like such an obvious improvement that I've been assuming there's some really principled reason I'm not aware of for why it isn't done.
Accidentally, I've folded comments many times. My main improvement to the extension (if I were to write my own) would be to _remove_ the folding feature and just have new comment highlighting (which I find much more important than folding). Separately, if this is an important feature, why not use an extension that offers it? Is there a reason it needs to be built in?
It doesn't happen that often, but when it does it's annoying scrolling trying to find the next top level comment.
We hackers will put up with really shitty UIs though, as virtually every one of our tools attests. It's like code indentation, we've all had to search for the next root node in an editor without highlighting or collapsing.
Because I only think about it on average once every few days when I encounter an uninteresting large comment tree in an otherwise interesting thread, which I handle by scrolling for a few seconds.
It's very much a "nice to have" rather than a dealbreaker, but for those of us accustomed to the feature as implemented on, e.g., reddit or slashdot, it's a puzzling omission.
Not having folding comments encourages me to read a good random sample of comments (as opposed to only the root comments) which has usually resulted in some fantastic discussion. On Reddit I read root comments and then instinctively collapse the remainder.
That's not to say folding comments wouldn't be nice, I'm just providing some counterarguments for them.
The typical solution to that is to give the users a setting page where they can pick between the two contradictory options.
With some careful design, and not overdoing it on options you can please most (but not all) people.
During testing we did notice an unforeseen consequence, but it was a good one. Reviewing vouched comments naturally leads to looking at the history of a banned account, and in a few cases we just unbanned it. Some had been banned for an obvious reason in the past, but recent comments were fine. Others had been banned by mistake, such as by a rogue spam filter. So although this feature applies on a per-comment level, it can have per-account side-effects.
This also raises the question of whether we can take this feature all the way to letting the community manage which accounts are banned (presumably with occasional moderator overrides). That's on our list, though it's too soon to tell if it will work.
In my profile, similar to [show dead] - let me select the number of new posts to randomly show...
And another idea: always show posts with word [xyz] in title...
Edit: and finally; collapsible threads please
(I've posted about this a few times; let me see if I can find the links.)
Edit: I found some of them, in addition to the ones scott_s mentioned downthread.
https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&prefix=false&page=0&date...
This would help people that simply don't take the time to click the "new" button often enough - people like me - to contribute to the initial selection much more often.
The simplest option would seem to tag these mixins somehow to make them obvious and, perhaps, allow opting out of this altogether in the account settings.
I'd urge you to try it again, but on a large scale. I know I personally would tolerate one questionable entry on the FP if it frees me from the need to do the /new duty.
(Edit) I should've not said "mix a random story", but rather "show a random story", somewhere on the FP, at a fixed place and clearly marked as such. This is it.For article links, it can be tracked with navigator.sendBeacon for recent browsers with JavaScript enabled, and a server-side redirect otherwise.
There is some risk of promoting click-bait this way though, so might need to be careful and provide an "undo upvote" or downvote button, and perhaps find some click-bait-related signals to hedge against (maybe time until next action on HN, titles with lots of generic words, similarity to Buzzfeed headlines, etc.).
I think this is a great idea for the community. I applaud this decision because there are quite a few accelerators, but the special part about YC is HN. Being open enough to give it it's own editorial steering wheel is a great indication of goodwill to the community :)
Now that HN is it's own thing, maybe we'll see access(api?) for vote attribution?
Is that even remotely possible? Or, are the implicit privacy issues too much of a burden?
I was thinking it would put rest to the voting rings theory if anyone had access to everyone else's vote history. But, the cost probably isn't worth the benefit.
I'm curious why you'd want this? Typically when voting people don't expect that they're going to be 'named and shamed', or even categorized on any level other than anonymously for stats.
Nevertheless, the conspiracy theories and rebellious "<name in other thread>, looks like you've been hellbanned by the evil mods!" comments are still around, and I suspect that the 'vouch' feature will help kill the last of it. I really hope that it'll work as intended!
(assuming it's all unfounded of course, which I believe it is)
I agree that hopefully vouching will kill the "<name>, you appear to have been hellbanned" comments, though.
Otherwise, I think both of these announcements are great news and would like to offer congratulations to Y Combinator, Dan and the whole community for keeping this such a useful site and community through all these years, even despite growth and changes to members.
Once we recognized the distinction between voting and flagging it seemed more natural to have this new feature be on the flagging side, hence vouches. The jury's still out on whether it's a good idea or not, though; if it turns out bad, we might consider reverting to the voting idea.
Regardless of the constant arguments around it, I use upvote/downvote on opinions I agree/disagree with. I'd use flag/vouch for things that I don't/do think should be on HN at all.
e.g., on a Pokemon forum I can strongly disagree with someone who says squirtel is the better than pikachu because water-type has more advantages that electric-type. I might downvote it, maybe. But if someone posts "Pokemon are stupid, you're all wasting your lives you big losers." ...I'd flag that. Conversely, if I posted how electric-type pokemon are the best and I notice a dead-reply to me explaining very clearly a position supporting water-type pokemon as best, I'd vouch for it. While I might not agree with the argument, I can at least vouch that it shouldn't be dead.